Demo
Lyrics
My heart is the only place
Where no one leaves and no one stays
All of these years filled with days
Where no one prayed
My heart is the only place
God feels so near and far away
And I don’t know what it says
That we left us like this
But all of these moments
Bleed into one
The clock and the calendar
Like a smoking gun
But I have learned to love
Enough to burn
Enough to change
Enough to yearn
God help me to love
Like you do
I hope that I die with tears in my eyes
Cause that’s how I live too
That’s how I love too
That’s how I love you
Dad,
I can only recall seeing you cry once. In the back seat of your old Daimler, cream leather on a dark night, round headlights and the low hum of the electric heaters warming the thick sadness in the closed air. You gave me something to hold, I can’t remember what it was now, I suspect a poem you’d written. And then the news. Your Dad was dead.
When I heard of your death the sky was crying down on me, and you, like the snowdrops had vanished into the face of a bright yellow daffodil.
That day as I walked back into St Aloysius, Faith was all that was left in me. Stripped of every reason not to believe, in one single blow.
Ever grateful to the dulcet tones of the priest who answered my anguished call that day. When he asked for your name I realised it was stuck like an ache in my heart now escaping wordlessly from my eyes.
Then when he spoke your name into the echo of childhood memories still alive and giggling in the pews we used to sit in, I knew the ache in my heart was going to live with me like all the rest, with tears in my eyes.
Nights of Grief & Mystery.. and connecting the dots backwards.
In the months before you died I was waking frequently in the night. Vivid dreams of you suffering, anguished and shrouded in darkness, calling to me but never facing me. Distressed and frequently afraid to go back to sleep, a voice murmured ever more loudly in me that something must be wrong. An anxiousness had crept into my waking life, an ominous and inescapable sense of foreboding hung in the air no matter the hour.
By the end of January 2024 the algorithm knew of my unrest (or was it you? or the Angels?) when Nights of Grief & Mystery emerged from the clamour of thumbnails, it was to change my life and your death forever… the podcast ominously titled End-Of-Life University… I clicked.
In it, a man, who reminded me heavily of you Dad… erudite, eccentric, verbose, poetic, cerebral, wise, musical, romantic, scathing, jarring, witty and capable of commanding a conversation. I was immediately comforted by his familiar presence, one I didn’t realise until that moment I was crying out for.
I was already ordering his book within minutes of his eery entrance into my life. And it was his biblical proportions of a book I was stuffing into my hand luggage on that late February Birthday trip. I didn’t know you were in the final throws of living, your death advancing on you like the enemy, but I distinctly remember how impossible it felt for me to even consider leaving Stephen’s book behind. It had to come with me. It was called Die Wise.
“The Angel of Death”
Stephen’s apt and infamous title, but my Faith lets me know without any doubt that the Angels brought his message to me, perhaps from you? Regardless, it turns out Heaven was not prepared to let your death have the final say in my life and the material for this crash course was the mystery and ministry of Stephen’s love song to death and how to live through it.
I wouldn't even have known to ask if you died with fear in your eyes, but because of Stephen’s work I knew how to ask it and what the answer would mean to me. So of all the things I wanted to know about your dying days Dad, that was the one thing I, with feverish urgency, needed to know. So I asked it. And the answer I didn’t want came. You fought your death, you didn't want to die, you concealed and denied your dying process, you died he says, with fear in your eyes.
I didn't know that i’d walk back into St Aloysius and find my Faith restored. I didn't even realise it was Lent, so far removed was I from the sacred rhythms of old. My heart, however, knew the spell of rebellion and worldliness in me was finally broken. The transfusion of peace streaming through my soul amidst your Lenten death was no coincidence and certainly not lost on me. Everything, everything conspired for us to reconcile in the din of hymns and prayers we had long stopped singing. Convicted with the intention to return to mass, I’m sure you were laughing at the spectacle of me suddenly thrown into the Passion of Christ, and finding myself retaking my Catholic Sacraments on accident on what turned out to be Holy Week. Your timing was impeccable.
At 5:55am today it will be a year Dad. And i’m weeks into my first 40 day Lent in 29 years. The Church’s crescendo of life and death and life again, will forever be the walk we can always take together now. Your fears did not come true dad and your memory is alive, living in me like poems of sound that I will sing forever into the void that holds us together.
A whole year of Faithfulness, purification and transformation. The desert years of our broken-heartedness now the redemptive power of what Love can do. The sacrifice of your dark and messy death, and the slow death of us, mean that fear will never be the final farewell our family have to this life. Finally down from our cross and risen again. You gave that to us. It remains the most bittersweet gift knowing these tears in my eyes are not only mine but yours. Generations of suffering pooling iridescent in my irises, spilling over the precipice of this unblinking present, finally reconciled to the mysterious visions of what can never leave and never stay.
I love you too, Clare x
The only love song
In thanks and praise for Stephen Jenkinson, who has delivered me soundly to the sobering reality of our collective legacy… to honour our lives as the only love song that we are morally obliged to sing everyday, especially on the day that we will die.
I hope that I die with tears in my eyes
Cause that’s how I live too
That’s how I love too
That’s how I love you
*picture taken the day after you died, on a drive with the kids, a double rainbow in the skies, and tears in my eyes.
Two resources for your death and theirs.
The thump of the base, the comfort of his easy grace, the gravity of his message… mystery woven seamlessly into melody… a monument to life’s greatest love song. Death.
stunning beyond